This week, Matt and Cameron explore Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. They talk genre, they talk the meaning of the soul, and they draw a couple points from — hold on, what do you mean he wrote a book about it? I did all this research and he just…he just wrote a book? Okay, that’s fine. Well, they’ll cover what he has to say, where they agree and disagree, and what it means to become human.
Major themes: The only genre is film, ears: the road to the soul, “just be happy doing chores”
02:43 - 1968, not 1969.
The music used in this episode was “Старое Кино / Staroye Kino,” by Перемотка / Peremotka. You can find more of their work on Bandcamp and Youtube.
This week, Cameron takes on the back half of Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur, covering chapters 25-43. As our characters finally arrive in the town of Chevengur, we go from a picaresque romp around the newly-Soviet countryside into the dirty work of actually building Communism.
This week, Cameron returns to the beginning of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Ukrainian Trilogy with “Zvenihora.” The film, released in 1928, explores a thousand years of Ukrainian history — spanning from Varangian invasion to the rise of the Soviet Union.
This week, Cameron dives into Vasily Grossman's first book of World War II: The People Immortal. Learn about how his writing evolved before writing his own "immortal" books, Stalingrad and LIfe and Fate
